Partition and existence

Abstract

This contribution concerns Chinese biclausal constructions introduced by the existential verb yǒu and including the bare noun rén ‘person, people’ in the pivotal position. Building upon spoken corpus data, I show that the co-occurrence of an individual-level predicate in the coda exerts a coercion on the reading of the pivot which is then interpreted as generic-partitive. I argue that, in such cases, the yǒu-construction is not used to signal referent unidentifiability. Rather, the biclausal pattern allows to prevent the bare noun rén from acquiring the universal interpretation (‘all people’) that it receives by default in the preverbal-subject position. These sentences are used to express the literal existence, namely the existence of a “subtype of people”.